In washington politics, all that ‘talk’ truly isn’t cheap

If you buy the dubious argument that political money is speech, then politicians are doing massive amounts of “talking” — maybe just to each other, quite often to people and interests already supporting and funding them, and sometimes to virtually nobody.

The fact that the numbers continue to escalate at exponential rates is hardly a stop-the-presses or mobile app news alert.

What is off-putting, to put it mildly, about an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of Georgia Congress members’ campaign finance records is the evidence of how truly gratuitous so much of this expensive political gratuity really is.

We are used to hearing how much of lawmakers’ time has to be spent on fund raising, taking them away from work they would rather be doing for We The People.

But is that really such a “has to”? According to the AJC’s Tamar Hallerman, the state’s 13 incumbent House members collectively spent almost $13 million in the two years before the 2016 election. All were reelected by at least 20 percentage points, and some faced no major party opposition.

Democrat David Scott ran unopposed in the Georgia 13th, and spent more than $938,000. Republican Tom Graves of the 14th, who faced two minor primary challengers and was unopposed in November, spent more than $770,000.

In 2015, a 75th birthday celebration organized by the campaign of John Lewis, the Atlanta Democrat and civil rights icon, cost $75,000 for the venue, $30,000 for catering and $50,000 for an event producer. The more than 1,500 “guests,” incidentally, paid between $25 and $5,000 each for tickets.

Tifton Republican Austin Scott spent more than $20,000 in 2015-16 on charter boat fishing trips for donors at the $370-a-night Inn at Perry Cabin on Chesapeake Bay.

“Georgia’s representatives,” Hallerman writes, “appear to spend most of their campaign money with the express goal of helping them raise more money.”

William Perry of Georgia Ethics Watchdogs said such spending only “helps lawmakers lead what I call the legislative lifestyle … [It] doesn’t benefit your campaign. It only benefits you as a person.”

As the money piles ever higher, the rationalizations sound ever hollower.

“When you’re looking at opposition, one of the first things that they do is they go look and see what a candidate has in his war chest,” one lawmaker told the newspaper. (God forbid the first thing they look at should be what he or she stands for.)

Yet the built-in advantages of incumbents — increasingly solidified by gerrymandering — have become all but insurmountable except for the independently wealthy or challengers with massive special-interest backing. Officeholders have party support and taxpayer-funded bully pulpits. That advantage is no doubt a reason so many Americans favor term limits, when elections ought to give voters that option every two years anyway.

“We’ve just become numb to it and it’s very, very unfortunate,” said Sara Henderson of Common Cause Georgia. “You don’t have anybody telling you no.”

This story was originally published August 22, 2017 at 3:45 PM with the headline "In washington politics, all that ‘talk’ truly isn’t cheap."